It almost seems like that and extension signing are designed to break extensions. I was going to ask who will use Firefox when the extension writing community is destroyed. But maybe they only want the ingenue neophyte blissfully unaware of being caged. IOW people who only know internet through phones and tablets.

They cannot possibly not know the effect. I was toying with the idea of trying my hand at writing an extension until I started reading the thread on the Firefox extension forum about signing. The handwriting is in the wall.

We need someone to create AnarchistFox. The browser that lets you do whatever the hell you want whenever you want to do it.

It almost seems like that and extension signing are designed to break extensions. I was going to ask who will use Firefox when the extension writing community is destroyed. But maybe they only want the ingenue neophyte blissfully unaware of being caged. IOW people who only know internet through phones and tablets.They cannot possibly not know the effect. I was toying with the idea of trying my hand at writing an extension until I started reading the thread on the Firefox extension forum about signing. The handwriting is in the wall.We need someone to create AnarchistFox. The browser that lets you do whatever the hell you want whenever you want to do it. _______________________

Your comments here would seem to be ironic, in retrospect, given that Mozilla Firefox rather started out with a vision representing a white night championing the freeing of the Internet experience from the death-like grip of the corporate ad-merchants' and MS Windows/IE fascists' control, or something, and incorporated deliberate design principles so that anyone could make FF "their own" with whatever extensions/add-ons/scripts one wanted. The many Internet serfs amongst us who strongly identified with and shared such a vision could stride into the future with heads held high, their fists raised in firm defiance, secure in the knowledge that, in FF, they had a White Night - a champion and an ally. This champion offered a means and an opportunity for the serfs to secure and control their unique personal Internet experience - their Internet independence and freedom - and even to help them to "stick it to the Man" - if they so wished (and some no doubt fervently did and may still do to this day).

/Rant ON.____________________________________The FF browser was a mascot, a logo, and - for some - an idol. It was A Just Cause in a Golden Age for Internet User Anarchy. So it became a sort of idolatrous Religion to fight the Crusade of Internet Anarchy, and it was going to make the world "a better place" - that is, if we all conformed and became FF users just like everybody else.

So, there were FF logos of all sorts, and FF banners for websites proudly proclaiming the FF "brand" and our lurve for FF, and there were FF parties, love-fests and conferences, and FF love-ins, wife-swapping parties and orgies, and FF discussion forums, and FF Doctorates became popular in universities, and people made FF cakes. Across the world, the parents of boy and sometimes girl children conceived by FF developers and fans during those heady times would often be christened with FF-redolent Christian names, including (for example):

"Firefox", "Fox" or "Foxy" (in English-speaking countries),

"Renard" (in French-speaking countries),

or the more masculine "Wulf" (as a matter of preference in Teutonic areas, or out of a misunderstanding in places where they either didn't have foxes or didn't know what foxes were),

or "Vulpo" (for native speakers of Esperanto).

Whatever happened to that vision? Hmm, let's see:

1. Gone are the encouraging but childishly amusing marketing logos of mighty Mozilla Firefox robots with rocket-drives built into their their feet, or something, conquering the Internet. Mozilla has now "come of age" and is toeing the party line and clearly not being allowed to continue its anarchistic and disruptive technology development.

2. Gone is the flow of encouragement/motivation directed at the Faithful - the FF supporter community - exhorting them to greater efforts to proselytizye and to "spread the Firefox word", or to put FF banners on their websites, or whatever. That would all be pointless, idealistic nonsense now.

3. Gone is the independent, anarchic uniqueness of FF, which seems to have become a semi-ubiquitous and increasingly iron-fisted vanilla product in an apparently pseudo-competitive market where all the other browsers have the same iron fist and taste, including IE, Chromium, Google Chrome, and FF's several forks. Yet MS is apparently declaring that it will be pulling IE out of the browser market? Yeah, right.

4. Gone is the sense of direction from Mozilla about "how many millions of downloads of Firefox" there have been, or what the browser market share looks like. So who at Mozilla cares who is using FF and why they are using it? The answer may well be that no-one is interested since it is irrelevant. The so-called "browser wars" (possibly a feel-good mythical invention?) have now ostensibly ended, with browser development apparently being controlled in the background via cartels - manipulative groups of corporate/commercial and political and spying interests.The Old Media of the newspapers and TV news channels (i.e., MSM - MainStream Media) were/are similarly controlled by these cartels, and obligingly regurgitate the same indoctrination - often word-for-word. Nowhere else does this seem to be more apparent than in the USA. Old Media are now being forced to transform into the New Media of the Internet, and there has been an ongoing struggle by the old cartel(s) to establish a pre-eminent position of control over the New Media and the technologies enabling the Internet.The prevailing/pre-eminent cartel(s) in each area of territorial sovereignty will slowly tighten the noose around users' necks so that users will be be forced to ONLY have the collective experience, utility and financial intermediation of the Internet that the cartels choose to allow and enable. Anything else will be defined as being "illegal". This is apparently being and likely to continue to be governed mostly through State intervention/decree and regulatory bodies appointed within areas of territorial sovereignty. This is already becoming a fait accompli in many instances, having resulted from covert and overt action and collaboration between States - e,g, including Pan-European, Pan-American, Pan-Australasian and Pan-Asian efforts on SOPA, TPP, etc.

5.Gone is the freedom to make and choose extensions/scripts.

We saw userscripts.org mysteriously taken off the air, and, as if to make certain, at about the same time as Greasemonkey was forcibly updated to a version that was apparently not backwards compatible with "older" userscripts.

Recently Read It Later (aka "Pocket") was silently made a mandatory component in FF. What the heck is that about if it isn't that prior FF policy and standards excluding such actions haven't been turned on their heads due to corruption for financial gain? I used to have the RIL extension anyway, but now that it has been made mandatory I am deleting the thing altogether (the extension and within about:config).

Recently, compulsory "Registration" was introduced unilaterally by Mozilla, which prohibited Add-Ons/Extensions which were not "Registered" by Mozilla - read "Licenced" - so all of our extensions slowly disappeared, to be belatedly brought back with "Registered" labels, and said labels being deliberately removed now so that we won't be able to tell which are which, and that will confuse us so that we won't be able to figure out which extensions have never been allowed back. This market manipulation is redolent of the Greasemonkey script called Facebook Unfriendfinder, which provided information about your account as to who had unfriended you and re-friended you, but Facebook lawyers apparently may have leaned heavily on the author and he withdrew it. It still, works, with a bit of tweaking to work around subsequent and ongoing Facebook changes.

6. Gone is Mozilla's apparent political independence, with Mozilla apparently succumbing to fascism, with the man who was a primary founder and architect of the Mozilla vision being mercilessly hounded out of his newly-Board-assigned position as Mozilla's CEO', within days of taking up the position, because a minority group apparently did not want him there and so picked on his personal and long-known views against homosexual "marriage", or something, as making him out to be unfit to be in what had become a politically correct organisation - where even certain thoughts or opinions that might differ from the official collective view were apparently no longer to be allowed and indeed were a crime to be punished by being put in the stocks for public humiliation as an example of what was to be done to heretics, followed by excommunication or professional lynching, or both. Shades of The Royal Society and Prof. Eric Laithwaite.____________________________________

Your comments here would seem to be ironic, in retrospect, given that Mozilla Firefox rather started out with a vision representing a white night...

-IainB

Likewise MS and the "PC Revolution" getting users out from under the thumb of the big bad System Administrator etc..

Now look how they are doing W10. Mandatory updates and they will spoon feed your fixes. I would not be surprised if at some point after an update there was no tweaking. Control Panel gone, Registry read only etc..

I think it will be "the last version of Windows" after all. Too bad OS/2 didn't flourish. There would have been competition from an OS that ran Dos programs and felt similar to Windows. No learning Emacs to use something else.

While it used to be possible to disable add-on compatibility checking entirely, by setting the extensions.checkCompatibility preference to false, it is now necessary to set a different preference for each new application version. This add-on re-enables the functionality of extensions.checkCompatibility irrespective of the current application version and disables checking by default. Checking can be re-enabled by disabling the add-on (which can be done without a restart) or by toggling the preference.

This is really frustrating. Luckily, you can pretty much disable this annoyance. Check out the add-on "Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks":

-CWuestefeld

I'm not talking compatibility but extension signing. If the powers that be will not sign your extension FF will not run it. Period. This happened several years ago on MaxThon and totally destroyed the extension writing community there. It is spreading to all the other browsers now. The same song and dance. "it is for your protection" yadda yadda.

The signing is not yet enforced. A developer of Firefox extensions tells me he expects it to go into effect in around 60 days. Of course you can run the old version for some time. I stayed with Opera 8.52 for years. But things change more quickly now. Especially with html5 stuff coming on older FF versions will become obsolete faster than ever.

It is similar to secure boot in Windows, only with no way to disable it. If the extension hasn't been signed it won't fire up.

Edit: Back in the day of MaxThon 2.x there were lots of MaxThon extension sites. I used to request features and occasionally help a developer test an extension. Now search for MaxThon extensions. There's almost none. They were destroyed by extension signing. The same thing will happen to FF. Like Yogi Berra said: "The future ain't what it used to be." He got that right. Sad to say.

1. Even if you take the "anarchy" element out of it, you could restate the case in "dry business terms" as simple as the age old "provide a better cleaner alternative to something, with more options and user experience to boot". Then you can use the second vocabulary of the biz books as your choice if you didn't care for the "revolutionary" language.

But now they're scrambling their original "biz message". Who exactly among users *favors* these machine gun updates? "While you were typing this we produced a new update, so that the version you started with is out of date before you are done!"

2. In between things being made directly illegal, is another layer of "corporation games". These include MS's sinking of Nokia via Stephen Elop, the ousting via outing at Firefox, buying up the niche players and then purposely shuttering them while swiping a useful piece of tech knowhow.

3. For all the hollering about "Ed Snowden" and Julian Assange, we have surprisingly few "tell all" sources on our side with nothing to lose who can just bust open a few of these secret agendas. So exactly who benefits in each of four time era periods with the mess going on with signed extensions is far from clear, and there's lots of fun house mirrors obscuring it all, leaving "poor tech board users" (us, and your choice of twelve other boards) to thrash out theories with no definitive tie-breaking intel.

(Aka for all the govt's luv of spying, notice we don't have very many?)

@TaoPhoenix: Yes, I reckon you put it very well, and this point in particular is familiar to me because it is tried-and-tested standard/"best" business practice, as taught in Business School 101 (Financial and Management Accounting):

...2. In between things being made directly illegal, is another layer of "corporation games". These include MS's sinking of Nokia via Stephen Elop, the ousting via outing at Firefox, buying up the niche players and then purposely shuttering them while swiping a useful piece of tech knowhow. ...

1. Acquisition: aquire/buy up (through hostile or friendly takeover) the desired assets and liabilities of the competitive product/producer/technology and run it as a discrete and separate function, for a while.

3. Preparation: shut down/mothball all residual/unwanted operations and resource costs that remain (including laying off now "non-essential" personnel), treating any losses or costs (e.g., discounted scrap sale, redundancy payouts) as "acquisition costs" or "business transformation costs" and as a charge/write-off against profits, for tax minimisation.

4. Disposal: sell/dispose of the remaining assets and liabilities treating any losses as "acquisition costs" and as a charge/write-off against profits, for tax minimisation.

This is what is often termed as being just "business as usual" for the average profitable and cost-efficient corporate psychopath. Any non-profit focussed distractions (e.g., image-building, "pet" projects of the CEO, or philanthropy) along the way are likely to be seriously unprofitable and if taken to excess may even eventually cause a business to collapse - a sobering example of the truth of this would be Control Data Corp.All's fair in love and war...

Hmm, there's something a bit "flat" about your "4-step process" that bothers me for feeling incomplete. I feel part of the problem is that portions of the whole effect are actually "innocent", with only malicious later stage opportunistic players "poking" at it.

We're getting to a point where we can't easily "generalize" these scenarios, because they're too tied to specific companies.

So if we're talking about the Decline and Fall of Firefox, somewhere in there is this big Microsoft Internet Explorer meta-game. So Firefox started off as this big "We're SO not IE."

But even in my modest tech understanding, browsers felt like "a thing" that you can try out, or not, at basically your leisure. I think MS has actually made scads of bad business decisions, but their early brilliantly subversive strategy cemented the OS land into a Meta-Game around Windows. To me it's one of the top meta-games in all of computing. Whereas for a browser, "oh look, let's try a new one!"

The company that keeps scaring me (in a tech-amazement sense) is Google.

So ignoring their "info collection policies", taken straight up "innocently", Google somehow just goes all Pac-Man in biz markets.

"Oh look. Apple re-invented the phone with the iPhone. But there's room for exactly two players in that market. So we'll go become the second one."

"Hmm. People seem to like these "browser" thingies. So we'll go make our own one of those too, and beat out the other *four* existing companies with combined thirty years of experience... yeah, three years should be enough to go do that."

So rather than something as focused as MS's pulverization of Nokia, Firefox seems to be "tricking themselves" into "Let's copy Chrome!" It's a bit like hypnosis. Nowhere else in computing do you produce these huge whole-number versions. But ... Chrome did it, so let's go! Rapid updating is fine. "Version 5.37 adds experimental chat support". Yay. Not "Version 39" (??!!)

Speaking of which I am on Firefox Nightly 42.0a1 (2015-07-09) right now. Not just to be latest and greatest. I am trying to find something that lets me watch flash video without pegging the CPU. So far there really isn't a substitute that works on ESPN3 to watch Wimbledon. But with this Nightly I seem to be able to keep it down to around 50% without closing all my Tray Hotkey thingies. I have to assume the GPU in this Laptop is just a conversation piece. Sure doesn't seem like any hw accel is happening here.

So far this Nightly seems as stable as FF 39. I hate it because every time I try a new FF it seems snappy for the first 2 weeks. It must be starting with a new data folder. Then it bogs down to just about the same speed as the last one I installed.